Otto Laske - Change and Crisis in Dialectical Thinking: On the Need to Think Again When Getting Involved with Change

I think it was my friend Albert Klamt who sent me this link, in response to something else I had posted. This great article from the always excellent Integral Leadership Review looks at the issue of change in adult development.

Here is his brief definition of dialecticism:

A simple-minded definition of dialecticism would be that contradiction lies in the nature of things, and that wherever reality is thought about holistically, the perception of contradictions enforces a privileging of larger organized wholes over isolated individuals and entities.

He offers a more in-depth perspective in the article. Good stuff.

Change and Crisis in Dialectical Thinking: On the Need to Think Again When Getting Involved with Change

Otto Laske

Abstract

I explore the concepts of “change” and “crisis” in order to put issues important in the current recession into perspective from the point of view of Western dialecticism, including what we know empirically about adult cognitive development. Specifically, I detail the diffraction of dialectic into three moments and show that they need to be coordinated to grasp change in transformational systems. In conclusion, I briefly relate these thoughts to present organizational problems and leadership development programs. I make a case for teaching especially upper-echelon teams the use of dialectical thought forms. My main source is my recent book on dialectical thinking as an ingredient of achieving requisite organization in companies, entitled Measuring Hidden Dimensions of Human Systems (IDM Press, Medford, MA, USA, 2009).

Introduction

Change and crisis are terms much in use these days, for obvious reasons. It is therefore of interest to think a little more about what these concepts entail, organizationally, developmentally, and in terms of “thinking” in general. In my understanding, both of these concepts are dialectical terms in that they refer to negativity, one of the main tenets of dialectical thought.

In this short talk, I outline in what way negativity is an ever-present regular feature of reality rather than an exception. I also make clear that acknowledging negativity in one’s thinking amounts to changing one’s frame of reference (FoR) since one has to give up a mono-valent, purely positive, view of reality, thereby making room for contradictions, clashes between opposites, sudden reversals, and breakdowns as an expectable feature of reality.

Most important about negativity is that it is not only a matter of content—this or that event or constellation—but rather a matter of pervasive structure. This holds in the sense that negativity determines the very fiber of reality as I show below. Reality also comprises the way people think. Concretely, if one assesses a person’s thinking in terms of its richness in what we can call dialectical thought forms, one becomes able not only to give feedback on the person’s frame of reference, one can also largely predict the contents of the person’s thinking—why the person formulates problems and makes decisions the way s/he does.

Related to the pervasiveness of negativity in the real world is the ubiquity of change and crisis. The latter simply follow from the logical structure of the real world even before time comes into play (Hegel, Science of Logic). From a dialectical point of view, change is the most ordinary movement of “othering” exhibited by “something” that, since it is inseparable from “something else,” constantly “moves over” into its negative or other. In so doing, it becomes a moment of the process in which it is embedded and thus, as Hegel puts it, “ideal,” a mere moment. The embedding process in which change occurs makes it evident that change is nothing but an aspect of transformation, and transformations are a direct outflow of negativity as an integral element of the real.

Equally, crisis—always both a risk and an opportunity—signals a transformation that now makes evident that a constellation of things, such as a market, has shown itself to be embedded in changes that put at risk older structures assumed to be forever, and has thus opened up new playgrounds for ingenious people who can think with the flow of events, that is, dialectically. Crisis, too, is logically built into the fabric of the real world but shows itself only at certain crucial junctures where transformations are especially deep. The larger part of crisis is therefore interpretive, in the mind, namely, in the speaking about events as making up a crisis.

What is Dialecticism?

Dialecticism is a frame of reference that becomes accessible to adults only after formal logical thinking is mastered in early or middle adulthood. It remains a closed book for the majority of adults in the Western world, while in Asian cultures nurtured by Buddhism it more easily assumes a common sense form. Dialecticism is based on the experience (stance) that the world (including people) is in itself contradictory and full of crevices. In this frame of reference, negativity is acknowledged and considered an integral part of reality. Dialectical frames of reference have a long historical tradition, both in Asia and the Western world, and this tradition has important things to say about the nature of change and crisis.

A simple-minded definition of dialecticism would be that contradiction lies in the nature of things, and that wherever reality is thought about holistically, the perception of contradictions enforces a privileging of larger organized wholes over isolated individuals and entities. Felicitously put, Reality is perceived as pervaded by negativity or absence (Bhaskar, 1993), simply because “something” is defined as being both itself and not itself, and this “not itself” stems from its intrinsic relationship to “something else” without which it could not be what it is. To refer to Hegel (1806), being and non-being (nothingness) are inseparable (Sartre, 1943).

While Asian dialecticism is largely part of people’s common sense, in Western culture dialecticism has never penetrated culture as a whole but has remained more of a philosophical tradition. Due to this fact, Western dialectical thinking has retained a semblance of “high-brow” thinking (if not leftist ideology), and has set itself apart from understanding (including scientific understanding) as reason. This distinction has been elucidated by 20th century studies in cognitive development that, even when restricted to formal logical thought (Commons, 1981 f.), have shown empirically that adults’ thinking increasingly tends to re-fashion logical tools as a means of dialectical (meta-systemic) discourse and dialog.

A not immediately obvious consequence of this is that a purely positive definition of reality—as if no contradictions existed—robs reality of its potential for change since contradiction introduces negativity or “otherness.” Change is nothing but an “othering” of things compared to the way they presently are (or are understood), and is not “something” that is external but rather intrinsic to them as finite things.

As Hegel demonstrated in his Logic (1812), when we scrutinize the structure of language, it becomes clear that a sentence like “I am changing” makes sense only if we assume that the “I” that is changing is the pivot of the change since it remains the same because of and through its changes. The changes of the “I” convey its transformative structure. Thus, speaking of “change” makes no sense unless we simultaneously think of the transformative identity of the subject, I. Change is always relative to ”something” that remains the same throughout and on account of the change. Transferring this to our notion of language, we can say that when taken in a positivistic sense, language only describes reality, whereas in a dialectical frame of reference speaking a language creates reality before our eyes and ears.

Clarifying Problems Before “Solving” Them

Reflecting on the structure of language used to describe change and crisis will, of course, not solve the problems that change and crisis engender. But it will help clarify problems in conjunction with showing that how problems are posed is determined by the phase of cognitive development the person posing the problem is presently in. Everybody has his/her own Inquiring System whose flexibility is different from that of another person.

As speakers, people are thus co-originators of change and crisis. As consultants, we need to look at the internal cognitive generator that first of all produces the events people describe as changing and critical. Taking this generator—and thus adult development over the life span—into consideration is not simply an epistemological exercise but a cleansing device by which we can teach ourselves and others to “think again”.

Read the whole article.

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